What's new on Fred Newman, Lenora Fulani and Social Therapy

LATEST POSTINGS AND LINKS as of July 15, 2011 on the Marxist "friendosex" cult and its amazing collection of friends, allies, protectors and dupes--Mayor Bloomberg, Judge Sotomayor, Greg Fortunoff...and many others.

Start with our July 2009 article on how then-Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor had been involved for at least six years with the extremist Newman cult's youth program run by notorious Jew-hater Lenora Fulani. The issue was raised in a New York Daily News column by Errol Louis five weeks before the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings began, but from then on there was a total media blackout on this disturbing story. Sotomayor was confirmed without a single question being asked by any Senator--Republican or Democrat--about her connection to the "Newmanites." And in the two years since, no one in the media has bothered to inquire as to why Sotomayor--a Justice of the Supreme
Court of the United States--continues to let the Newmanites use her name in their fundraising publicity and in their efforts to recruit and indoctrinate young people.

July 15: The Strange Life of the Late Fred Newman. Historian Ron Radosh draws some of the hard lessons from the Newmanite infiltration of New York politics that the New York Times, in its obit on Chairman Fred, was too timid (or too protective of Mayor Bloomberg) to grapple with.

I find it noteworthy that Radosh and many people with views radically different from his seem to be at one about Fred Newman and the social therapy cult. Indeed, there's a broad consensus of sorts among pundits, scholars and activists with an interest in political weirdness (or who've witnessed the Newmanites in action) that social therapy a/k/a the International Workers Party is a malignant outfit. This consensus, extending across the political spectrum, has included--for example--Radosh, a neocon; Christopher Hitchens, a half-neocon; Justin Raimondo, a paleocon isolationist; Tim Wolhforth (quoted by Radosh), an ex-Trotskyist turned democratic socialist; Chip Berlet, a liberal-leftist with a "movement" background...and I could extend the list of names on and on, even without getting into the anarchist or Marxist-to-the-end-of-time spheres.

Some of these Newman critics might play the left vs. right double standard game regarding various other obnoxious political figures ("your extremist ally is more dangerous than my extremist ally") or might even disagree over how to define a particular villain (LaRouche is a fascist! no, he's a communist!). But there doesn't seem much margin of disagreement on Newman.

Is this Newman's great achievement in life--that his narcissism, grandiosity and piggish behavior earned him condemnation across the spectrum? Unfortunately, the New York socialites and other charitable do-gooders who stuff his cult's pockets with cash have always been oblivious to such criticisms. They see his charities through rose-tinted glasses. Meanwhile, his "life partner" women at the Bank Street collective are laughing all the way to the piggy bank.

July 7: Cult leader Fred Newman dead at age 76. Rick Ross of Cult News writes that Newman died "late Sunday July 3rd of renal and subsequent cardiac failure." Newman was a philosophy teacher in the 1960s but "was fired from seven colleges. Later he created something that he called 'Social Therapy.' According to Newman, who was not a psychologist...his therapy is about 'two workers, revolutionary therapist and slave/patient, [and their] struggle together to make a revolution through their practice.' The goal is 'helping the slave reach the point of insurrection' and 'to make proletarian truth and freedom where there is now bourgeois truth and slavery.'"

Fred Newman, 1935-2011.

Dec. 9: The human toll of Newman and Fulani's cult. Here's an April 12, 2009 posting at The Cahokian recalling the late gay activist Steve Rose, who became HIV positive in the 1980s and ended up in Newman and Fulani's New Alliance Party before dying of AIDS in the early 1990s.

"The last time I saw Steve was on a street corner. Although a few years before he made numerous sharp and stingingly incisive polemical attacks against the New Alliance Party and their ilk, by then he was defeated. Facing personal demoralization along with the challenges of fighting HIV Steve joined the NAP. When I saw him on that corner telling me of his new allegiance to NAP I saw such despair behind his eyes belying the wooden and rote recitation of how NAP had helped him to see that his problems were not his own, rather the burden of oppression and capitalism. It was heartbreaking to see him so broken, so surrendered to the easy answers of a cult that could do his thinking for him. I grieve that he spent his last years in such company. While brash and not always sympathetic, Steve was a fighter and a real hero of gay liberation. The cult that parasitically attached itself to him, joining the HIV in sucking out his life force, cannot now go unopposed."

Steve Rose (holding sign) shortly after he joined the NAP.

The Cahokian's account rings true. Several former members of the NAP (and of the underground "International Workers Party"--the cadre org that controlled the NAP and today controls the Bloomberg-financed New York City Independence Party) have described to me in interviews how Newman & Co. often ruthlessly exploited people with serious illnesses, by getting them into social therapy sessions and persuading them that Revolutionary Struggle was the answer to their trauma and despair. The first experiments were with people suffering from cancer back in the 1970s. Next came AIDS patients, and gays haunted by the fear of AIDS or the death of close friends.

The late activist Robert Cohen, after breaking with the Newmanites, wrote a long letter to the New York Amsterdam News (1993) about the cult's attempts to parasite off the gay and lesbian community and how AIDS had become just another fundraising gimmick for Fred Newman.

"When Newman, a self-described 'benevolent despot,' sent his followers (myself included) out to the streets of Greenwich Village to raise money in support of the AIDS Bill of Rights (ABOR), it soon became apparent that the measure was a sham.

"There was never any serious attempt on the part of the NAP (IWP, etc.) to gather enough legislative support with which to pass the bill (just ask any of the representatives on Capitol Hill about the ABOR). In fact, the proposal (actually a rough draft which was never assigned a bill number), was simply a tactic designed to elicit an emphatic response so as to solicit money from a desperate community which was, and remains, under siege from AIDS.

"I will never forget the despair of the gay community, and the initial hope and faith that they had in us when we first began to raise money through the ABOR scam.

"It was not uncommon those days to work an 8-hour fundraising shift on Bleeker Street or Sheridan Square and then walk away with one or two thousand dollars donated by people affected by, concerned about, or who had AIDS.

"I remember going to the home of Noel Levert (a brethren NAPer who has since died of AIDS), to count the money, and how proud we were to finally have found a way to gather support (i.e., big bucks) from our community.

The late Noel Levert, also duped and exploited by the Newmanites.

"After counting the money, we would promptly hand it over to Jim Mangia (Newman's most useful and skilled operative in the gay community). But, the money was ultimately used to pay for anything that Newman ordained (i.e., rent for NAP/IWP offices, salaries, and/or used in ways that only Newman will know), and definitely not for the ABOR as we were led to believe."

And back to Steve Rose: IWP/NAP defector Marina J. Ortiz described in a 1993 New York Planet series on the cult's inner workings how it managed to make use of Rose even while he was dying. The cult had concocted a scheme to report inflated expenditures on Fulani's 1992 Presidential campaign to the Federal Election Commission, thus enabling the Fulani campaign committee to obtain matching funds to which it was not really entitled.

"Fred Newman Productions, Inc., New Alliance Productions, Inc., Ilene Advertising, Castillo Communications, and other NAP subsidiaries, for example, billed the campaign almost one million dollars for advertising, public relations and consultation services. However, aside from, perhaps, one or two salaried employees (who averaged $300 a week), much of the actual labor provided by these businesses was borne by unpaid 'volunteers.'

"Descriptions of services rendered are equally dubious. Automated Business Services, for example, was paid thousands of dollars for 'payroll and accounting services,' while the owner himself was then listed under a 'clerical services' heading, as were dozens of other supporters--including the late Steve Rose (by then an AIDS-stricken invalid). Quite a few, however...maintain that they never received any money from the campaign."

In other words, once Rose was too sick to work for the cult on the streets or in an office, Newman and Fulani found a way to squeeze a last dribble of profit out of him--as a name on a phantom payroll.

You can read Cohen's full letter here and the full Ortiz series here. The Cahokian posted a second piece (Nov. 26, 2009) on Steve Rose here which is mostly personal reminiscence but also includes comments on "social therapy." The photos of Rose and Levert above come from ex-iwp.org's "In Memory of People Exploited by the IWP" collection.

Oct. 6: The Newman-Fulani organization: a study in deception. Here, available on the web for the first time, is the Anti-Defamation League's 1990 report on Newman, Fulani and their "Marxist-Leninist" therapy cult (the shadowy International Workers Party). Shorter but in some respects more perceptive than the ADL's 1996 report ("A Cult by Any Other Name"), this one has a certain literary as well as political interest--it was written by the distinguished American novelist David Evanier, who worked as an ADL editorial staffer in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Of special importance is the section on Newman and Fulani's dealings with Libya (pp. 8-9), including how Fulani led an IWP delegation to the then capital of terrorism in 1987 and how she and Newman held a rally at their Castillo Cultural Center in April 1989--only four months after the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland--at which Newman called for "unconditional defense" of the Libyans. Also, on page 9, Evanier cites how Newman and Fulani's National Alliance mourned the death in 1988 of Palestinian terrorist Abu Jihad--the mastermind of the Black September attacks at the 1972 Munich Olympics. According to Evanier, the cult's weekly newspaper hailed Abu Jihad as "one of the [international left's] greatest political-military tacticians" while labelling his assassins a "Zionist murder squad."

Fulani (center) in Libya's Geryan Mountains in April 1987. She and her International Workers Party delegation were paid by the Libyan government (at the urging of Louis Farrakhan) to attend a "peace" conference that was really an unsuccessful attempt to launch a Terrorist International. This was at a time when Gadhafi was already targeting American military personnel with his terror attacks. On Fulani's left is IWP muckamuck Nancy Ross, who in 2005 would receive tens of thousands of dollars from a lump sum donated by Mayor Bloomberg to the New York City Independence Party (an IWP front) for campaign work on behalf of his 2005 reelection bid.

I hope Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor will read this report, and do some hard thinking about whether she wants to continue her involvement with the Newman-Fulani movement. I also hope that her fellow justices will read it, and demand that she repudiate this sick cult.

I'd like to hope that Mayor Bloomberg would also break with Newman and Fulani--and apologize to the families of the 270 victims killed in the Pam Am Flight 103 explosion for his foolish mistake in donating $50,000 to the Castillo Cultural Center in 2002 (only months after Fulani had compounded her earlier antics by blaming the Sept. 11, 2001 murder of an additional 3,000 innocents on the "arrogance" and "aggression" of the U.S. government). Unfortunately, our mayor doesn't seem morally capable of recognizing that there's anything seriously wrong with the beliefs and practices of his Newmanite friends.

August 17: Fred Newman and Lenora Fulani make hay out of their connection to Sotomayor. When Sonia Sotomayor was being sworn in on August 8 as the newest Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, over one hundred young people were watching it on TV at the mid-Manhattan headquarters of the All Stars Project--a youth charity run by Marxist psychotherapy guru Newman and his sidekick Fulani where Sotomayor has long served as a mentor for teenagers. Although the kids doubtless were thrilled to see "their" Sonia take the oath of office, Newman and Fulani apparently saw it as an opportunity to garner publicity for themselves even if it might prove embarrassing to their most famous volunteer worker.

The result was, among other news items, this segment on CBS-TV's New York Local News gushing over All Stars, its kids, and the Supreme Court Justice Who Cares. Apparently the show's producers couldn't bother to spend a couple of minutes googling the youth program (if they had, they might have restrained the puffery a bit). I can only imagine how much this TV clip (and other adulatory news reports about Sotomayor's work with All Stars) will be worth in donations to Newman and Fulani from wealthy liberals--and how much it will improve the public image of their cult-racket. Still, the news segment does give us two useful bits of information:

First, we are told (and this apparently comes from All Stars CEO Gabrielle Kurlander, who is interviewed during the segment) that Sotomayor has been working with the charity since 2002. Note how, as more information about Sotomayor and the Newmanites emerges, the starting point of her association with Lenora Fulani and other cult organizers keeps getting pushed back: from 2006 to 2003 to 2002 (and that's assuming our new Supreme Court Justice's first contact with the Newmanites was through All Stars and not through social therapy sessions at an even earlier date--a large percentage of All Stars volunteers are recruited through social therapy).

Second, the script of the news segment states: "Even though she now serves on the highest court in the land, organizers at the All Stars project believe [again, this is probably from Kurlander] that Sotomayor will be back this year to run a workshop." Does that mean All Stars already has a commitment from her?

It would appear that the incontrovertible evidence of the sleaziness of All Stars founder and behind-the-scenes leader Newman--for instance, his defense of patient-therapist sex on NY 1 News in 2005 (here) and again in 2007 (here and here), and his boastful 1990 account here of his own behavior as a therapist which he published along with pathetically servile expressions of adulation from several of the women in question, including Kurlander, here--will be dumped into the New York Times/Fox TV Memory Hole for political reasons. It would also appear that the media will continue to ignore the various eyewitness accounts suggesting that the reality of All Stars has been quite different from what's in the fundraising brochures or displayed at the Potemkin Village talent shows, and that the Newman cult's record with young people over the past 37 years has been nothing short of appalling (see here and here).

However, on the issue of the Newmanites parasiting off Sotomayor to improve their image, it was actually the Obama administration that first seized on Sotomayor's work for All Stars (which the cult had been rather discreet about) as a way of presenting her as the minority candidate who "gives back" to her community. Newman and Fulani were thus presented with an opportunity they couldn't let pass. I just wonder how many teens will end up on the cult's Marxoid/Friendosexual recruitment track as a result of the recent publicity boost for All Stars.

July 30: Fred Newman lays bare the secrets of his cult racket (Judge Sotomayor take note!). Here's the transcript of a clandestine 1983 meeting of the so-called Office of Economic Development (OED) of the International Workers Party (the party that Newman would have us believe is a myth--he's trained the members to "perform" its non-existence when among outsiders). Newman and other IWP leaders--most of whom are still with him today--discuss in this transcript the party's control of various front groups, including social therapy's New York clinic, and allude to what appear to be plans or practices re money laundering, loan fraud and other financial crimes.

The transcript--long available to researchers at ex-iwp.org but presented here in a reader-friendly version--also shows that Newman's greed was clearly getting out of control: "There's big money in Marxist-Leninist organizing if we set up the structure." And: "The damn New York Institute for Social Therapy and Research is a bloody goldmine. I really wish I could convince you business types that that's true. There's big money out there. In all of its versions--Marxist version, cleaned-up version--all the different versions. There's heavy money."

Judge Sonia Sotomayor, our soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice who apparently thinks the Newmanites are the cat's meow so far as youth programs go, should read this transcript. Yes, read it, Judge. Count how many times the participants in this discussion appear to be referring to past, present or anticipated criminal acts. Count how many times they refer to what appears to be the manipulation of social therapy patients (all IWP members have to undergo social therapy) in order to squeeze donations to the party from them (a highly unethical practice, if not an illegal one). Do you think this crew has changed over the years? That Newman and his communist "wives" and other IWP "lifers" have magically turned into the Father Damians and Mother Teresas of inner-city charity work? Just what kind of Harry Potter spell would have accomplished this?

And please note that although the statute of limitations has obviously run out on any criminal acts that may have been alluded to in this transcript, the document also provides evidence--as does subsequent information on the public record--that the Newman network is structured in some respects like a racketeering enterprise (see New York Newsday articles here and Gasink complaint here, both from the early 1990s).

As to recent questionable activity: Why in the early and middle 2000s was All Stars raising funds from the public for a supposedly very large talent show program (for many years, they falsely claimed to work with 20,000 kids annually) yet only producing three or four shows each year in New York? Why was the All Stars Talent Show Network reporting expenditures of over a quarter million dollars per each of these shows, which were held in public high schools where only modest rental fees (if any) were charged, and with staffing mostly by adult and youth volunteers? What happened to this money (as much as eight million dollars over about a decade): Was it simply transferred elsewhere through the creative IWP accounting techniques alluded to by Newman in the 1983 transcript?

You should not need to be told, Judge Sotomayor, but I'll say it anyway: your involvement with these people has been naive, reckless and totally inappropriate for a federal judge. You should immediately separate yourself from any and all entities controlled by Fred Newman, Lenora Fulani and their followers.

Mayor Bloomberg, shown here testifying at Sotomayor's Senate confirmation hearing, played a huge role in President Obama's decision to nominate the Wise Latina. Is it a coincidence that of all the Supreme Court-qualified judges in New York (or in the entire United States), Bloomberg chose to promote the only one who happens to be involved with his Newmanite friends? And will Sotomayor, given what she owes to the mayor, ever be willing to repudiate her involvement with Newman's All Stars Project?

July 23: Will Sotomayor try to say that she didn't know about Newman and Fulani's Body Snatcher cult? Apart from the fact that just about everyone in New York politics in the early 2000s knew Newman and Fulani were nuts, Sotomayor may have read media exposes of their network such as this 1999 cover article from The New Republic: "What You Don't Know About Lenora Fulani Could Hurt You." Before signing up to lead workshops for the cult's charity, Sotomayor easily could have found the TNR piece at http://ex-iwp.org (along with massive additional documentation). And at any time after its original publication she could have accessed the article (or gotten one of her assistants at the Federal court to access it) via LEXIS-NEXIS. My guess is that she DID read TNR's unsparing critique of the Newman movement--which tells, among other things, about their clandestine "International Workers Party," the paramilitary camp, the quack therapy, and Newman's predatory sexual behavior--but managed to rationalize it away in order to pursue her new friendships with Fulani, Pam Lewis, etc.

Playwright William Pleasant--a former member of the IWP's central committee and a key eyewitness source for the TNR article--sent me his take on Sotomayor and Fulani the other day:

"Sotomayor, a child of the NYC regular Democratic Party--literally sprung from the thighbone of Chuck Schumer--is no political fawn-in-the-woods. She knows who Fulani is. She knows that Fulani's alleged Youth Development program is but one of many paper-mâché "charities" hatched by Fred Newman to shake down corporations and guilty liberals in the name of ghetto kids. The kids get nothing in the end, Newman gets paid.

William Pleasant.

"Sotomayor knows that Newman/Fulani are a walking political shipwreck, careening from one end of the political spectrum to the other in search of patronage--READ: $$$ and only $$$ for themselves. There are certainly scores of former Newman associates who could have pulled the WISE LATINA's coat to Newman's corruption and dubious psychiatric schemes--including his self-serving myth of development and copulating with his patients. No parade of pro-Newman schills can erase 40 years of Newman's lies, abuse and graft. And Fulani's lockstep obedience to her 'mentor'. It's public record.

"So, why is Sotomayor agush for Lenora Fulani's sandlot bootstrapping program? It's a phony from start to finish. Only Sotomayor can answer. She should have been asked in Washington at her confirmation hearing. Rev. Al Sharpton certainly got rewarded for boosting Newman's All Stars Network ("Let's Develop") scam. How about Sotomayor? Let's hear."

[NOTE: Mr. Pleasant was Newman's close pal in the 1980s and knew many of the group's secrets--where they stashed the cash, where they hid the guns, etc. He quit when it became clear to him that Newman was using the party's funds for personal purposes. Mr. Pleasant became an outspoken critic of the group, in spite of being physically assaulted by Newman loyalists. You can read here his statement about coerced abortions in the IWP, which should shed a bit of light on where Fulani fan Sotomayor stands on Roe v. Wade.]

July 22: Judge Sotomayor, your favorite charity is part of a destructive cult! If you don't believe me, maybe you'll believe this 2007 University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation by sociologist Alexandra Stein, who closely examined how social therapist Fred Newman recruits and controls his followers. I also urge you to read Dr. Stein's recent comments on her blog here, in which she gives you the benefit of the doubt re your involvement with All Stars (she was once in a cult herself and knows how easy it is for such groups to manipulate idealistic people).

Sociologist Alex Stein.

I agree it's easy to fall victim to cult manipulation. I myself was briefly taken in by Newman's followers in 1977 and even wrote a newspaper article that defended them against charges of cultism and helped elected one of their candidates to a Manhattan school board (I corrected my mistake in follow-up articles). However, for you to stay around them for six years or more, and not spot their weirdness and sociopathy, betrays extraordinary naivete, at the least. And your allowing the White House to cite your work for Newman's Development School for Youth as an example of your civic mindedness and concern for social justice can only be described as outrageous.

Judge Sotomayor, you are about to ascend to the Supreme Court of the United States--and Supreme Court justices should be held to the very highest standards. You owe it to the American people and to the leaders of this country who've placed their trust in you--and to the kids you've irresponsibly helped to steer into the Social Therapy orbit--to look beneath this cult's deceptive veneer.

First, read Dr. Stein's study, then read my "Report to the City" here which documents Social Therapy's appalling exploitation of children and teens going back to the early 1970s. Talk with former members of the cult. Ask American Psychological Association ethicists about Newman's ideas on patient-therapist sex. And finally, do the right thing: Publicly renounce all association with All Stars, Newman and Newman's sidekick Lenora Fulani. Contact all the young people who were in your All Stars workshops, and also their parents. Tell them about your decision and warn them about the true nature of this outfit.

Stein's chart of the Newman cult from inner to outer layers: Fred's "wives," the "40 lifers," the "party cadre" divided into "cells," the cultural and political peripheries.

This article shouldn't be dismissed as some one-shot opinion piece expressing only the author's personal views. Nothing this controversial EVER would have appeared in Newman's paper without his express approval of its ideological contents. Indeed, it marks the beginning of an off-again/on-again Newmanite campaign to defend notorious child abusers that would continue into the mid-1990s. (And note to the left of the article the ad for Newman's then-named New York Institute for Social Therapy and Research.)

Although the article appears under the heading "The Pink Triangle," no one should blame this on the gay or lesbian movement, which Newman and his followers were never legitimately involved in. (Newman did induce straight men in his cult to dress up as gay in order to man tables asking for money to fight AIDS--the cash would then go to his inner core to be used, according to ex-members, for purposes unconnected to the AIDS issue.)

I hope that Judge Sonia Sotomayor, Obama's nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court (and a former prosecutor), will read this early 1980s piece which expresses the cult's evolving views on the issue of sex with minors. Sotomayor has been working as a volunteer with Newman's Development School for Youth, which she describes as her favorite charity. She certainly needs to learn something about the history of this charity--and of the people who run it.

July 14: "Performing the World" with Sonia Sotomayor? In responding to a Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire, Judge Sotomayor has revealed that she gave a speech to a Development School for Youth graduating class as early as 2003. And here, on the committee's webpage, is the text of that speech, which suggests that Sotomayor was already beginning to pick up the Newmanite jargon: "We all have to work and to perform our lives....I hope you hold on to the memory of each time you performed in this program and felt good about yourself and about the group you have been part of." (emphasis added)

And: "Look at me. Look at Dr. Fulani and Pam Lewis [a longtime Newman follower who helps lead All Stars]. Look at all of the people who have led you in workshops. These can be your lives." Hmmm...Sotomayor is recommending Farrakhan friend Lenora Fulani--the woman who once urged Libya's Col. Gadhafi to get "not nonviolent" with the United States--as a role model for teens?

July 14: Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor and the "friendosexual" cult. The media has pretty much ignored the Daily News column by Errol Louis (June 9) that reveals how Sotomayor has worked as a volunteer for the past four years (actually it's at least six years--see above) with the Development School for Youth (DSY), a program controlled by veteran anti-Semite and psychotherapy guru Fred Newman along with his infamous sidekick Lenora Fulani. The White House says that the DSY is Sotomayor's "favorite project."

The most charitable spin one can put on this is that neither Obama (a former law professor) nor Sotomayor (a former prosecutor) did any due diligence on the Development School for Youth.

The DSY--a dress for success program based on the idea that you succeed by performing as if you were succeeding--is part of the All Stars Project, a multimillion dollar charity scam founded by therapist Newman, who has bragged publicly about having sex with his patients. Newman's cult has introduced his theory of "friendosexuality" to teenagers via the All Stars programs. The cult--which works with kids as young as four through an All Stars talent show network--also has a history of defending the National Man-Boy Love Association and a number of high-profile individuals and groups accused of abusing children.

Oh, and don't forget the clandestine revolutionary meetings at Chinese restaurants, the burn-after-reading commands from headquarters, and the semi-automatic weapons training at a Pennsylvania farm where, um, things got a bit out of hand.

It would have taken no more than five minutes of due diligence via Google for Judge Sotomayor to find all this out. Perhaps she never bothered to check...Or perhaps she just sees nothing wrong (as disgraced former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer didn't either) with the antics of Newman and his multiple "wives," the most important of whom is the one you never hear about--the bookkeeper.

My opinion? If after several years of hanging out with the Newmanites, Sotomayor still doesn't notice that there's anything Pod-like going on, she doesn't have the judgment or common sense to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.